This
might just be the U.S. military’s finest hour on film. They had already saved
the world from the Axis powers during WWII and now only a small handful of
officers and crew will stand between the world and a hostile alien invader. John
Carpenter featured clips of this film in his classic slasher Halloween,
before remaking it in 1982 (hewing much more closely to John W. Campbell’s
original source novella, Who Goes There?). However, nobody has ever
matched the authentic swagger and attitude of Christian Nyby’s The Thing
from Another World (sometimes simply called The Thing), produced by
Howard Hawks, which airs soon on TCM.
Captain Pat Hendry is the sort of leader who inspires confidence during times of crisis, but when it comes to romance, not so much. When the film opens, Hendry is taking a good deal of ribbing in the officer’s club over his disastrous date with Nikki Nicholson, a civilian employee in the Arctic research station Hendry’s crew often visits to resupply. It is there that he meets Ned Scott, a journalist and old friend of his co-pilot, Lt. Eddie Dykes.
Scott
will hitch a ride with Hendry’s crew when they are ordered back to the Arctic station
to investigate a mysterious crash site. It turns out the mysterious object was
indeed a flying saucer. Rather unfortunately, the standard-operating salvage
procedure results in the destruction of the craft (causing more grief for
Hendry, especially from the research director, Dr. Arthur Carrington), but the
alien occupant is preserved, frozen in ice. Hendry wants to keep him that way,
but when it is accidentally thawed out, the Thing starts wreaking havoc. It
turns out it is dashed hard to kill, because of its plant-like cell-structure,
but fortunately the American military is endlessly resourceful.
The
Thing (1951)
is one of the greatest monster movies ever, not because of its special effects
(which were really just okay for its era), but because of its superior characterization
and dialogue. To this day, controversy remains regarding whether or not Nyby or
Hawks really and truly directed the picture, with the rat-a-tat-tat pace of
each exchange supporting suspicions of the latter (bringing to mind classics
like His Girl Friday and To Have and Have Not, helmed by Hawks).
In fact, both Hawks and Ben Hecht did uncredited punch-up work on Charles
Lederer’s screenplay.
No
matter who did what, The Thing (1951) perfectly captures the rhythms and
cadences of military speech. It is all the more impressive, because Hawks and
company were working around the Production Code. When Hendry tells Dykes and
Lt. “Mac” MacPherson “just once I’d like to have a co-pilot and navigator who
are wet behind the ears” we can tell he is really saying something much ruder
and exponentially more explicit.
